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December 12, 2018 - January 22, 2019
I went through the series of the things that had triggered his first doubts.
This doubt is based on the implicit belief that religious people are saved by God because of their goodness and morality.
This doubt stems from a belief that if we human beings can’t discern a sufficient reason for an act of God, then there can’t be any.
my friend realized that the moral standards he was using to judge hypocritical believers came mainly from Christianity itself.
they weren’t being Christian enough, but why should they be, if Christianity wasn’t true at all?”
“To insist that the universe be run like a Western democracy was actually a very ethnocentric point of view,”
for every contention that one verse contradicts another or is an error, there are ten cogent counterpoints.”
Nothing I have said should be read as an argument for irrationality or belief based on emotion and impulse alone.
We should have as many good reasons for what we believe as possible. However, there is both an objective pole and a subjective pole to knowledge. The Enlightenment, following René Descartes and John Locke, refused to see the subjective as true knowledge at all.
Derrida and Michel Foucault, being sensitive to how power shapes public perceptions of truth, attacked the idea that there was any objective pole at all.
Polanyi’s goal was “to restore the balance of our cognitive powers.”27 Social scientists have argued that we arrive at what we consider to be “truth” through a range of methods including analytic thinking, experience, empathy or “mentalizing,” and intuition.28 Augustine understood that reason and faith work always together and that reason always operates “under the guidance of antecedent belief.”29
Reason does not and cannot operate alone.
Secularity is marked by a call “to take active responsibility for the progressive improvement of the world . . . [to] work for the betterment of other humans, even strangers beyond our shores.”
However, where did these values come from? Not only can none of these humanistic moral standards be proven empirically, but they don’t follow logically from a materialistic view of the world. This problem seems invisible to many.
given the secular view of the universe, the conclusion of love or social justice is no more logical than the conclusion to hate or destroy.
Jacques Derrida
the concept of crime against humanity is a Christian concept
secular society has found no good alternative way to ground these ideals.37
Christian faith grew and supplanted classical Greco-Roman culture and pagan thought in the West.
because “Christianity gave to the world . . . [ideas that] . . . many modern ethical systems
Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity—an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.”40
the resources for an understanding of “natural” human rights.
As Horkheimer in the 1940s and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s recognized, the idea of human rights was based on the biblical idea of all people being created in God’s image.42
a positive view of the body and of emotions.
the great human struggle is not between mind and body but takes place within our hearts, “the hidden core of self that could respond to or reject the will . . . [and God’s] fatherly love” or not.45
Christianity, then, saw the battle for human virtue as no longer one of head versus heart (becoming more rational), nor mind over matter (getting more technical mastery over the world). The battle was over where to direct the supreme love of your heart.
For the first time the supreme goal of life was not self-control and rationality but love.
these new views of the importance of the body and the material world laid the foundation for the rise of modern science.
Christianity brought an unprecedented idea of the importance of the individual.
Christianity on the contrary promises immortality of the individual person:
is there any problem with just keeping the moral values if we like them? In many ways, there is.
This “package” of Christian moral beliefs made great sense in an intensely personal universe.
This has been the root of my faith since childhood - the strength of the personal
When the Gospel of John called Jesus Christ the Logos—a word that meant to the Greek philosophers the supernatural order behind the cosmos—it was revolutionary.
It was the unprecedented idea that the power behind the world was love, a personal God.
without it “the philosophy of human rights to which we subscribe today would never have established itself.”
No one has made this point more forcefully than Friedrich Nietzsche.
There is no transcendent reality beyond or outside of this life that can serve as a standard by which to determine what parts of the world are right or wrong.
then you are still holding on to Christian beliefs, whether you will admit it or not.
Nietzsche’s critique of secular humanism has never really been answered.
he predicts that in societies that reject God, morality itself will eventually become “a problem.”
It will be harder and harder to justify or motivate morality, people will become more selfish, and there will be no way but coercion to control them.
How, he asks, can you promote unselfish behavior using selfishness as the motivation?
“rights talk” will simply be the way whatever party is in power keeps itself there.
The humanistic beliefs, then, of most secular people should be recognized as exactly that—beliefs.
He wanted to turn from the “banal creed” of modern liberalism to the tragic, warrior culture (the “Ubermensch” or “Superman”) of ancient times. He believed the new “Man of the Future” would have the courage to look into the bleakness of a universe without God and take no religious consolation. He would have the “noble spirit” to be “superbly self-fashioning” and not beholden to anyone else’s imposed moral standards.
In short, he can’t stop doing what he tells everyone else to stop doing.
Nietzsche is calling people to worship themselves, to grant the same faith and authority to themselves that they once put in God.
Nietzsche’s views were important inspirations in the twentieth century to totalitarian figures of both the Left and Right, of both Nazism and Stalinism.
people neither adopt nor discard faith in God through pure, objective reasoning, because no such thing is possible.
moral values are always grounded in faith assumptions with a cultural history.
